Reader Response Notebooks

Two recent posts on Twitter. The first shows "speed dating" by undergraduate students at Queens College, thanks to Prof. Dina Weiss. The second points the way to a blog post I did on the NCTE blog ( https://ncte.org/blog/2019/01/reader-response-notebook ) about The Reader Response Notebook.                                           

 Dinah Weiss, Ed.D., is both an outstanding 4th grade teacher AND an instructor at Queens College, NY. She actively explores the RRN with her college students. Here are some samples:   About the Instagram response, Dr. Dinah Weiss shares: One of the QC students took it upon herself to create a new reading responses. She merged her love of art with the reading response work. She understood the power of reading responses to elevate a students deep thinking of a text.  She made an Instagram page for a character, she visually showed the complexity of problems a character was having, and I she showed the intersection of theme and complexity of character relationships using a color-coded system.

 Dina Weiss, 4th grade teacher, also uses the RRN with her undergraduate students at Queens College.  Dina reports:  QC students are developing their own reading responses that are accumulated in a journal for the purpose of showing their future students how to respond to text meaningfully. It's an assignment in my syllabus that they create a reading response, mentor journal that they can use during strategy group work to help students build their comprehension.  Here are some more photos. One of the QC students took it upon herself to create a new reading responses. She merged her love of art with the reading response work. She understood the power of reading responses to elevate a students deep thinking of a text. She made an Instagram page for a character, she visually showed the complexity of problems a character was having, and I she showed the intersection of theme and complexity of character relationships using a color-coded system.       ...

4th Grade Teacher, Dina Weiss (Ed.D.), shares the following (Jan., 2023):  the students in my class doing a kind of speed dating community share of their reading responses based on their independent books. They were reading each other's responses for the purpose of getting ideas for their own future response work, as well as giving supportive feedback on how their classmate can show deeper thinking with their work. 

 I only now found this post on Twitter from October 6. 2021, during the height of the pandemic. Thank you to @AmyLink11, who posted it: I love when teachers leave a PD & start implementing great strategies immediately! Kids were “speed dating” discussing whether numbers were odd or even! Best part: it was a strategy from the book The Reader Response Notebook by @tedsclassroom @AnnaTXTeacher @DISDElemMath . Check out this short, delightful video from Amy's class: https://twitter.com/i/status/1445929016754466816 

 Just received the following email: Hi Ted! Hope all is well. My name is Evan Dickerson. I took your reader  response notebook course over the summer. I was the only high school  English teacher there. I wanted to share with you some of the work my eleventh-grade students  have been doing at Nutley High School in Nutley, NJ. We're in a unit  on evaluating fiction. Our focus questions are "Why are some stories  considered 'timeless'? What makes a 'classic' piece of fiction?" To diversify their notebooks, I had students complete a  sketch-to-stretch entry in which they had to "illustrate the central  conflict of the story". Both the students and I were amazed by the  results. They actually found that they thought more deeply about the  sketches than they ever did while using a traditional box-and-bullets  strategy. Thanks for sharing such valuable resources. They are definitely not  just for elementary students! The entries you'r...